The Promise of Happiness [antikvár]

Chapter One harles Judd has walked on the beach almost every day for the last four years. When it is cold - it's early spring, but freezing - he needs to pee more often than is natural. Away from the house, where Daphne is heroically trying to cook something fishy from Rick Stein's cookbook, he often pees in the open. There's nobody around, and it reassures him that when he's out of the house he can pee freely. There's none of that gush of youth, of course, and he has to be careful of the wind direction, but still he feels calmed. When he was a young man, peeing imperiously into the urinals at Fox and Jewell, he used to direct a strong stream at the cigarette butts or the blue cakes of deodorant that lay on little rubber mats. This deodorant had an unnatural glitter, and released an unnatural smell of pine. Why do deodorants smell worse than the odours they are disguising? Minicab drivers in London always make their cars stink of resin, issuing from little Christmas-tree things swinging from the rear-view mirror. When he used to send the company car to be washed, he told the fleet manager, Arnie Prince, to ask them not to wipe it down or spray it with Fruits of the Forest or Bavarian Conifer or whatever it was. But it always came back stinking: What canyer do, Mr Judd, they're Nigerians. FII try sending a runner wif a cleft stick next time. Arnie Prince was a card. At this time of year at the beach the scents are deeply maríné. The air itself is loaded with fishiness and iodine and dislocated mussels. He sees a fishing boát coming in over Doom Bar, trailed